Throughout history, non-Jews have drawn on Jewish Culture to legitimize their profoundest values. In this conference experts from a great variety of fields in Jewish History will discuss the many ways Jew served as a non-Jewish legitimation, attempting to better understand the complexities of Jewish non-Jewish relations.

Recent historiography on Jewish non-Jewish relations has developed an awareness of the complex an dynamic ways Jews interacted with the cultures in which they lived. This conference will draw on this trend by exploring the notion of ‘the Jew as legitimation’. Using this concept, it aims to identify a significant phenomenon in Jewish History, that may help to come to a better understanding of Jewish non-Jewish relations, venturing beyond classic notions to characterize this relationships like oppression, integration, assimilation and acculturation.

The notion of the ‘Jew as legitimation’ expresses a phenomenon in Jewish History where the Jew, or the call for protection of Jewish existence (their toleration and survival), serves to validate non-Jewish ideologies. Examples of such usage are abundant (and often the subject of current research): It may be found in Augustine’s notion of the Jew as witness to Christianity, in its expression in the legend of Ahasveros, in the early modern tradition of Christian Cabbala, of Christian Hebraism, in various eschatological theories, in non-Jewish calls for Jewish Emancipation, in the non-Jewish popularity of Jewish themes in popular culture, in Christian Zionism, and in contemporary right wing populist defences ofIsrael.

The speakers of the conference will discuss a wide variety of such cases in which Jewish existence served to legitimize principles of the non-Jewish worlds Jews lived in. They will shed light on some of the following questions:

Jewish Responses

Jews were given a role in ideologies that were not necessarily theirs. How did Jews respond to this? Did it effect their self-image? Did their it bring them closer to those non-Jewish groups whose ideologies they legitimized? Did they become advocates of such ideologies or did it instead cause them to emphasize their difference? Did they make use of their non-Jewish ideological importance for their own practical interests? Did it cause internal Jewish debate?

Connections to anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism

Many ideologies have also been legitimized through anti-Semitism. However, in anti-Semitism, not the Jew, but his harassment, discrimination and even destruction serve as a legitimation. Still the question should be asked whether there is interaction between the ‘positive’ legitimizing role of the Jew, and anti-Semitism. Did, for example the legitimizing role of Jews give them a prominence that caused envy and thus triggered anti-Semitism? Or did it, in fact, mitigate anti-Semitism? What about the legitimizing role of Jews in phrases as: the classic anti-Semite’s defence: “My best friends are Jews”.

Continuities

Can continuities be identified between the different usages of the Jew as legitimation? Is the Enlightened interest in Jewish rights, secular continuity of the Christian usage of the Jew as legitimation, and is the post Second World War image of the Jew a continuation of both? Are there continuities in Jewish and non Jewish ways of dealing with usage of the Jew as legitimization? Can the notion of the Jew as Legitimation provide an explanation for Jewish survival?